


here all the bombs fade away

by celinamarniss



Series: Retirement [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Happy AU, outsider pov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-15
Updated: 2017-03-15
Packaged: 2018-10-05 14:57:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10310792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/celinamarniss/pseuds/celinamarniss
Summary: At one point or another, nearly everyone in town had stopped by Shae's shop with a new story about the mysterious couple who had recently moved into Old Lady Gemma’s place.A prequel tothe history books forgot about us.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I'm pretty sure frangipani put me up to this one, too.

“They’re wizards,” Sala’s little boy Omi said seriously. “They can do magic.”

“I heard they’re big-shot war heroes from the Core,” Sekkan said, with a belligerent click of his mandibles. “Frelling Outsiders.”

“ _He_ told me he and his wife were professors,” Inik told Shae. “From some fancy Mid-Rim school. I can’t remember the name…”

At one point or another, nearly everyone in town had stopped by the shop with a new story about the mysterious couple who had recently moved into Old Lady Gemma’s place.

People who came from “Outside”—meaning off-worlders in the local slang—didn’t come to this area of Waypoint very often and had been a surprise to everyone when Old Lady Gemma had sold her property and the couple had renovated the house and settled in. Unless you had relatives on Waypoint, you didn’t come from Outside and _stay_. People from Outside barely came to their small town at all. Waypoint itself wasn’t on any major shipping lanes and had never seen action in any of many wars that plagued the galaxy; the Empire had come and gone, and life went on. Waypoint had always been populated by a hodgepodge of colonists and descendants of colonists who had lived on the planet for centuries, who didn’t want any fuss from the outside galaxy and were happy to just get on with it. Strangers from Outside who unexpectedly bought a house a few miles out of town was exciting enough news to keep everyone talking for months.

Months went by and Shae had only glimpsed them briefly passing through the market; an older human couple, rather unremarkable looking from a distance. There was no doubt who they were, since Shae knew everyone else in the town, and they’d all known her from the day she was born. The new couple, she had heard from a reliable source, were friendly enough, though hadn’t made much of an effort to integrate themselves into the community yet—but after all, people said, what would you expect from Outsiders? Still, the stories continued to trickle in from townspeople who had, or at least, claimed to have had, encounters with the off-worlders.

Shae hadn’t had a chance to see the couple up close until the afternoon that most of the town had cleared out to attend the annual fair in Hulltown. She'd decided to stay behind. She could have closed up the shop and joined her wife, Nadiya, spending the day negotiating with suppliers and hunting for bargains in the fair’s colorful booths, but she’d had a headache that morning and didn’t feel up to dealing with crowds.

General Paka, the old Sullustan who stopped by the shop every other day, was another exception. Usually he chatted with Nadiya, but today he sat quietly and watched a holonews feed on the battered screen that had been rigged up in the corner where he sat slowly sipping his caf. Shae didn’t think he was actually a General, but that’s what everyone called him, and he was always friendly in a gruff sort of way, and didn’t insist on making small talk. She’d been caught up in a holonovel on her datapad when the door to the shop chimed and the couple from Outside came in.

After all the stories that she’d heard the last few weeks, she wasn’t sure exactly what she expected, but they were rather ordinary-looking humans. The husband’s hair was grey and his wife’s was the faded color of red hair turning white. They both had the pale pink complexions of fair-skinned humans, the husband’s a slightly darker sun-tanned shade. They weren’t wearing anything outlandish—they wore trousers and tunics and boots like everyone else. They didn’t look like fugitives or war heroes or like Jedi wizards, as Omi still kept claiming to anyone who would listen. They looked around curiously at the shop, at the neat rows of household goods and useful odds and ends that any small neighborhood store carried.

“Do you serve caf?” the woman asked as she strode up to the counter.

“We’re not a caffa shop, but we have a pot.” Shae gestured toward the nook where there was a small pot of inexpensive caf and watched as the women poured two cups.

“Thank you,” the husband said with a warm smile. “We went looking for a caf shop in town, but everything was closed.”

“Yeah, Hulltown’s having their annual fair. Practically everyone goes.”

“But not you?” He took the cup his wife passed him with a nod, as she fished around in her pockets and came up with credits for the caf.

Shae shrugged. “My turn to watch the shop.”

“I’m Luke and this is my wife Mara,” he introduced himself. Mara nodded absently, her eyes roaming around the shop.

“I’m Shae. Can I help you with anything?” Nadiya was better at chatting up customers and Shae was sorry that she’d missed meeting them. After all the stories they’d heard from various customers, Nadiya was dying to talk to the couple herself and drag new details out of them.

“Oh, we’re just looking around,” the husband—Luke—said. His wife had spotted General Paka and greeted him as though they’d met before, and Shae recalled that General Paka had offered his own stories about the couple a few weeks ago. “We came to town to pick up some power converters but since the supply depot’s closed, we thought we’d look for a place to buy a cup of caf. You have a nice shop here.”

“Thanks,” Shae couldn’t help but warm to the compliment. “If you’re looking for—”

“Shae! Shae!” The door to the shop slid open and the twins Mika and Kiki tumbled in, their cheeks flushed a deep purple as though they’d run all the way across town. The two little girls began to babble simultaneously, and it took a moment for them to calm down enough for Shae to understand a word that came out of their mouths.

“...Arenya-ki told Omi that he couldn’t get even _one_ kyre hawk egg and Omi said that he could—” Kiki began.

“—we didn’t think we would, but he did—” Mika said.

“Did what?” Shae said.

“Omi took Arenya-ki’s pedal bike and went down to the Well to steal an egg!” Kiki finished. “He went all by himself!”

“Kyre Hawk Well! What were you kids thinking!” General Paka snapped. The girls jumped.

“We didn’t go!” Kiki said, just as Mika wailed “We didn’t do anything!”

“What’s Kyre Hawk Well?” Luke asked.

“It’s a huge crater up on the Norstern plateau. The kyre hawks nest in the rim.” _And razor-tail lizards,_ Shae thought, her stomach sinking even further, which made any attempts at egg-snatching an incredibly dangerous endeavor only attempted by the well-trained or reckless. Or by small children who couldn’t say no to a dare. “It’s miles away. How far could Omi get?”

“He took a pedal bike!” Kiki blurted out.

“And you’re just telling us  _now?_ ” Shae said.

“We didn’t know he’d gone until we saw the pedal bike was gone!” Kiki said.

“He could’ve left hours ago!” Mika confirmed what Shae had feared.

“If he reaches the Well at all, and _doesn’t_ fall off a cliff and kill himself, the razor-tails will tear him to pieces…” Kriffing kids. It was times like these that made Shae glad that she and Nadiya couldn’t procreate.

Mika sucked in air in fast gasps as she began to hyperventilate and Kiki looked as though she wanted to cry. Luke dropped to his knees and spoke to them quietly in a soothing tone. “He's got it covered,” Mara said, nodding at Shae.

Right. Someone had to go find that kid. She ducked through the door at the back of the shop and ran up the steps to the apartment she and Nadiya shared on the second floor. Think, _think._ What did she need? She wrapped a long blue scarf around her head to protect her lekku from the sun and the stood in the middle of the room, chewing her lip, trying to remember the code for her aunt’s speeder. Nadiya’d taken theirs to Hulltown. It would take time to contact Nadiya (if she'd remembered to keep her comm on at all) and more time would be lost as Nadiya extracted herself out of the fair and drove the speeder back to the shop. Maybe Captain Paka would lend her his. Worry gnawed at her stomach. She could think of a dozen people better suited to hunt down a lost kid, so didn’t it just figure that it fell to her. She pulled down the old hunting rifle she’d inherited from her aunt and had only touched once or twice since. At least the power cells were still good.

When she came back downstairs, Luke had already calmed down Mika and Kiki and was distracting the sisters. “I’m a twin too, you know,” he was saying as she stepped back into the shop.

“Really?”

“Yes! My sister Leia is a princess. She lives in the Core with  _her_ twins, Jaina and Jacen. Jaina is a great pilot and Jacen married a princess too…” No wonder there were half a dozen tall tales about him and his wife circulating around town. He was spreading them himself! She caught General Paka’s eye and he gave her one of his slow blinks of amusement.

“How come you don’t live with your twin anymore?” Kiki asked.

“I live with Mara now, and we wanted to live somewhere a little quieter than the Core.”

Shae stepped aside to where General Paka was hovering. “Can I borrow your speeder to look for Omi?”

The General shook his head. “My wife took the speeder to Hulltown too. You could ask them,” he nodded at the couple from Outside.

Shae glanced back. They appeared to be having an argument, albeit a quiet one that mostly consisted of a series of pointed glances over the heads of the two children. Luke said something softly to Mara that Shae didn’t catch and Mara shook her head. It took Shae a moment to recognize the look Mara had on her face; it was the look Shae herself made when Nadiya was about to insert herself into someone else’s business. Mara looked narrowly at her husband, pursing her lips. “You’re just looking for trouble, Farmboy.”

Luke turned to Shae. “How are you going to find Omi?”

“Came we come?” Kiki said.

“No, you can’t,” Shae said firmly. “I need to find a speeder then I’ll head out to the crater look for him. Someone needs to comm Sala—Omi’s mom—and let her know what happened.” It could take a long time to search the crater, especially if she had to look for a body— “The crater’s huge. I might not be back until after dark. ”

“And it’s dangerous?” Luke was looking at her rifle.

“That’s for the razor-tails. I just—” She glanced at Kiki and Mika, Kiki’s face still streaked with drying tears. “I just hope he’s okay.”

Mara eyed the rifle as well. “Does that thing even work?”

Shae winced. It had definitely seen better days. “Yes?”

Luke looked pointedly at his wife. Shae glanced at her, trying not to be too obvious about it. Mara lifted an eyebrow and made a minuscule shrug and Luke smiled at her.

“We’d like to help,” he said to Shae. “I can take you anywhere in our speeder, and we’ve got a security droid that we could send out to scan the area. It’s a LA-SS1 patrol droid with a Rissant tracking and scanning system. That should cut down on search time.”

“A security droid? You have a security droid?” What did they need with a security droid, all the way out there? Most people Shae knew didn’t even lock their doors.

“We like our privacy,” Mara said in a tone that didn’t encourage further interrogation.

“Okay,” Shae dropped that line of questioning. “ _Thank you_. General Paka, can you comm Sala?”

The General agreed to comm Omi’s family and to keep an eye on Kiki and Mika, who were protesting over being left behind, even as Shae followed Luke and Mara out of the shop to the vehicle hovering nearby.

Now that was a _speeder_. The land speeder was an Elipson model that you couldn’t buy on Waypoint, even if you traveled all the way to the capital. Shae had seen one in a holo once. It had sleek, classic lines, and a powerful engine, with a double row of seats open to the air. It looked new, too. The couple must have brought it with them when they moved to Waypoint, and Shae couldn’t even begin to guess what that had cost them. Luke offered Shae the front seat as he took the controls, and Mara slipped into the backseat. At any other time, Shae would have been eager to take a ride in a speeder this  _classy,_ but it was hard to enjoy it under the circumstances.

Luke drove the speeder out of town and towards the house that he and Mara had bought, and they sped over the fields of kala grass that surrounded the house for miles. The kala grass had turned from yellow to a deep red that rippled in the sun as far as Shae could see. In a few months, the shade would shift to purple as autumn set in. A grove of trees sheltered the house from the sun, and a wide porch (a new addition since Shae had last seen the house) wrapped around the low building. As Luke brought the speeder to stop in front of the house, an astromech droid rolled out to the porch to greet them.

“Hey Atroo,” Luke said. “Can you signal El-One?”

The droid warbled back. Shae’s binary wasn’t great, but the tail end of that response sounded borderline rude… But Luke just chuckled as though the droid had made a joke. Mara had swung out of the speeder and was already headed up the stairs. Shae stepped out as well, a little at a loss at what her role was here.

“Here she comes,” Luke said, pointing. There was the glint out in the fields that turned into the silver body of a patrol droid zipping over the grass on repulsorlifts. The droid was circular, with antenna and other sensor equipment sprouting out of the top and bottom of the sphere, and red paneling along the sides.

The LA-SS1 patrol droid trilled a greeting as it neared. “Hello El-One,” Luke said. “Do you have an updated map of the Norstern plateau?” The machine bobbed in front of him, whirring in response. “We need you to locate a boy—human?” He glanced at Shae, who nodded. “A human boy who’s been lost in a place called Kyre Hawk Well.” The droid beeped an affirmative. “Good. Calibrate scanners to locate a human boy in the parameters specified.” After a string of binary Shae couldn’t follow, the droid bobbed over to the speeder and hovered over the backseat with an expectant air.

Mara came out of the house carrying a large case that she dropped in the backseat next to El-One. “Here, Farmboy.” She tossed an odd-looking metal cylinder to husband, who caught it and clipped it to his belt.

“I was starting to feel naked without out it,” he said. Shae noted that Mara wore a similar device on her belt.

“Farmboy?” Shae finally asked. Inik had said that _Luke_ _had said_ they were teachers, not farmers. Teachers who had their home guarded by a positively ancient astromech and state of the art patrol droids. None of this made _sense._

“I grew up on a farm,” Luke said. “Mara’s a city girl, though.” He whistled a few bars of the popular song “Coruscanti Princess.” His wife shot him a dirty look. The astromech burbled a follow-up that made Luke laugh and which Mara ignored. She zipped opened the case she’d brought from the house. Inside were a pair of military grade rifle blasters, a smaller short-range blaster, and... a grappling hook?

Shae tried not to gape. “That’s—that’s—” She stopped short of protesting when Luke, positioned behind Mara, caught her eye and shook his head slightly. “...That’s great.” High tech security droids, an arsenal of weapons—she thought of the rumors of old Imperial madmen who had fled from the Core and hid out on small, obscure planets, and it suddenly struck her that Luke and Mara had never offered their surnames, as humans usually did.

“We’re not criminals or madmen,” Luke said, looking amused. They both did.

“Great, you can read my mind,” Shae grumbled.

“Well, that’s easy,” he laughed.

 _Would_ a pair of Imperial fugitives joke around or look like someone’s grandparents? It was always possible, but Shae had to admit the odds were unlikely. That sort of thing didn’t happen on _Waypoint_.

“Are we still good?” Mara said, looking bemused.

“Yeah, let’s go.” Shae tore her gaze away from the stash of weapons and returned to her seat. A dozen questions churned through her head. Why had a couple with access to military-grade equipment settled on Waypoint? What exactly had they been involved in before they moved out to Outer Rim? Were they criminals or war heroes, as Sekkan had speculated?

She finally chose a question that, on the face of it, could be considered fairly innocuous. “What brought you to Waypoint? We don’t get a lot of people from Outs—off-planet.” She didn’t mention that she’d never been Outside once in her entire life, and had a hard time imagining leaving her home planet and making a new start somewhere entirely different.  

“That’s… a very long story,” Luke began. “After our son finished his—finished training, we were looking for someplace quiet to retire, and we liked the look of Waypoint.” He fell quiet for a few moments, as though considering what to tell her next. “We both fought in the War.” Shae could hear the emphasis he put on _war_ and figured he wasn’t just talking about a minor interplanetary skirmish, he was talking about the Galactic Civil War, the War to Overthrow the Empire, the war that tore the galaxy apart and which had ended before she’d even been born. “We started out on opposite sides, and when we met she wanted to kill me—it’s a very romantic story.” Mara made an exasperated noise behind them. Another one of his tall tales, Shae thought. Princesses and star-crossed lovers.

“You’re not really fugitives, though, right?” Shae had meant to say it jokingly but somehow it just came out sounding slightly worried.

“Um,” Luke said.

“We have security droids for a reason,” Mara said, her tone dry. “But don’t worry, we’re not hiding from the law, or from anything that concerns you.” Right, because that wasn’t worrying at _all._

“The thing is,” Luke continued. “Conflict doesn’t stop when the war’s over. Mara and I were involved in the rebuilding efforts, but there comes a point when you just have to step away…” He trailed off, and Shae sensed some buried emotion—regret?—behind the words. He fell silent again, as the landscape passed in a blur.

“There are things that never leave you,” Luke said softly, almost to himself. “It’s nice to be somewhere that wasn’t touched by all of that.” Out of the corner of her eye she saw Mara’s hand lift to rest on her husband’s shoulder. At first she thought it was a warning or a comforting gesture, but she decided it was neither. It came to her that the gesture reminded her of when she took Nadiya’s hand in the evening when the shop was quiet: a way of being close to someone for no particular reason at all.

“I didn’t know you’d fought in the War,” Shae said. Nadiya had a distant uncle who had come back from the Galactic Civil War and everyone said he hadn’t been the same. Come to think of it, he’d also moved out into the wilderness, preferring his own solitude to town life. “Inik told me you were teachers.”

“We were that, too,” Mara said. “We’ve done a lot of things.” There was that dry tone again, that hinted at a history that Shae couldn’t grasp; stories behind the stories.

The comm beeped. Luke gestured to Shae to answer it, and General Paka’s gruff voice crackled through the speaker. “Have you found him yet?”

“No,” Shae told him. “We’re—”

“Can I talk too?” Kiki’s voice came through the com.

“Be quiet, child,” General Paka said. “I’m trying to get intel on their location.” A muffled argument went on just outside of comm range.

“Did you speak to Sala?” Shae asked.

“Yes, yes,” the Sullustan huffed.

“No, you didn't,” they heard one of the girls say in the background.

“Ahem, well. I spoke to Jo Harn, who said he’d pass the message on to her sister, who would talk to her.”

“That’s not the same thing,” the girls insisted, their voices tinny and distant through the com.

It wasn’t, but considering how fast news moved in a small town, it would probably work. “Thank you, General,” Shae said to cut off any further debate.

“Where are your coordinates?”

“We’re getting close. We’ll comm you again when we find him.” She shut off the comm before the conversation could devolve further.

They _were_ getting close. Shae could see the crater in the distance, rapidly coming closer and closer. Kyre Hawk Well was a deep jagged hole in the center of the plateau, miles across, dry and sun-baked, with a few scrubby trees clinging to the rim.

El-One unspooled a string of binary phrases, and Luke pointed: “Over there.” Arenya-ki’s pedal bike lay some distance away, tipped over onto the black rock. Shae couldn’t tell which direction Omi had taken from there. Luke slowed the speeder to a stop as they approached the sunken crater, and El-One rose from the backseat and zipped through the air towards the Well. It hovered in the center of the deep bowl of the crater, the light at the top of the droid’s sphere blinking steadily as it scanned the area. Mara’s fingers drummed on the top of Shae’s seat as they waited and Shae tried not to fidget with impatience. Without LA-SS1, they would have had to circle the entire rim of the Well to find Omi, and that was assuming he hadn’t fallen…

The light at the top of El-One’s dome flashed a bright blue, a beacon that signaled a discovery, as the little droid swooped to the north. Luke accelerated toward the rim of the crater. “Oh no, _ah_ —” Shae barely had time to shout before the speeder cleared the edge. Most landspeeders weren’t built with the same repulsorlifts that airspeeders had, and Shae expected the vehicle to drop, plunging them all to their deaths, but Luke simply touched the controls and the hum of the lifts changed as they adjusted to the height. The speeder didn’t even shudder as it glided through the air. She eased her grip on edge of her seat and tried to wipe the panic from her face.

They followed El-One across the crater’s bowl to the Northern rim. As they got closer Shae could see the body of a small boy lying prone on a ledge below a clutch of kyre hawk nests tucked in crevices in the rock face. He’d clearly tried to climb down the side of the cliff to reach the nests and had fallen, and the narrow ledge jutting out from the cliff face had caught his fall. Even from a distance, they could tell he was in bad shape. Shae couldn’t tell if he’d survived the fall or not.

 _Oh hells,_ Shae thought, _oh skudding hells_ — 

“He’s still alive,” Luke reassured her. As if he _knew._ “We’ll reach him in time.”

The kyre hawks, disturbed by the sound of the speeder, fled from their nests, their shrieking cries piercing the air. Four razor-tail lizards were already scuttling down the cliff toward the boy. The razor-tails were nearly the size of a full grown twi'lek, the whip-like tails that gave them their name adding more than a meter to their length. They weren’t frightened by the sight of the speeder; they simply blinked their six eyes up at the machine and slunk closer to Omi.

Shae lifted the blaster rifle and tried to take aim, but the beasts were already too close to Omi and she didn’t trust her aim. “Pull in a little closer,” Mara said, and stood, bracing her foot against the rim of the speeder. Shae looked up as Mara unhooked the metal cylinder from her waist and flicked a switch on the side. A beam of magenta light burst from the hilt.

"What the _kriff?_ " Shae gasped.

Mara shot her an amused glance. "What did you think it was?"

"I didn't know it was a laser sword!" Come to think of it, she had seen holos of Jedi who wielded those kinds of weapons before— _Lightsabers_. “You really are Jedi.”

“Yes, we really are,” Mara said dryly. Luke swung the speeder by the ledge, close enough that Shae could hear the razor tails hiss angrily.

Mara leapt across the gap. Even though it wasn’t a great distance Shae’s stomach dropped at the thought of the fall if she missed her footing, but Mara didn’t even stumble, landing in a crouch on the ledge and sweeping forward with her lightsaber. Shae craned her neck to watch Mara as Luke looped the speeder around. The lightsaber slashed through the air and lopped off the nearest razor lizard’s head. Mara dodged the lash of the second lizard’s razor-tail before bisecting him in a smooth stroke. She kicked the bodies of the lizards over the edge of the ledge, loose rocks tumbling after the corpses as they disappeared into the depths of the crater. The two remaining lizards scrambled frantically up the cliff and out of sight.

“Okay?” Luke called across.

“My knees are going to pay for that later, but otherwise, yes.”

Luke carefully parked the speeder at the edge of the ledge and Shae gingerly stepped out of the vehicle, with Luke following behind her. Omi lay slightly up the slope of the ledge. It was hard to tell if he was still alive. “I’ll—I’ll comm an emergency medic—” Shae wasn’t sure they should even move him. Luke crouched down beside the boy and gently laid a hand on his chest.

“He’s still alive,” he told them. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

“Wait,” Mara said, catching hold of Shae’s arm as she moved forward to help. “Give him a minute.”

Eventually, impossibly, she watched as color returned to Omi’s cheeks and his breathing grew steady. Shae felt her jaw drop open in shock, an expression she’d always heard about but hadn’t believed actually happened in real life. She had just watched a human pull a child back from the brink of death. She looked to Mara, who was watching with an intent expression on her face, her fingers still loosely wrapped around Shae’s arm. Luke sucked in a deep breath, and rocked back into a sitting position, as though winded from a long run.

Mara placed a hand on his shoulder. “Okay?”

“Yeah. That’s never easy.”

“It was beautifully done.” Mara kissed the top of his head.

“Thank you.” He smiled up at her. “You too.”

“He’s... going to be okay?” Shae asked, still dumbfounded. Omi looked as though he was sleeping peacefully now.

“Yes, he’s going to be okay,” Luke stood, brushing off his knees.

Mara gently picked up Omi, tucking him against her body, his head resting on her shoulder. “He reminds me of my son when he was that age,” she said with a soft expression on her face.

Shae stared at the both of them. They behaved as though this were all completely normal.

“So those are the kyre hawk nests?” Luke tipped his head back to look up at the nests jammed into the crevices in the rock face high above their heads. He lifted an arm and a kyre hawk egg sailed out into the air and then gently floated down into his hand in a perfect arc. Shae felt her mouth fall open again.

“Show-off,” Mara said.

He shrugged. “I was curious.” He turned the egg in his hand. “Are they good to eat?” he asked Shae.

“They're a delicacy.”

Luke tossed the egg to her. She caught it and stared, slightly dumbfounded. The large reddish shell was speckled and sun-warm in her hand. “A reward for spending your day chasing after a runaway with a pair of old soldiers,” he said.

 _“Old,”_ Mara scoffed. “Speak for yourself.” She began to walk carefully down the slope towards the speeder with Omi still in her arms.

The sun was beginning to sink in the sky as they headed back to town, washing the landscape in golden light. Shae watched the familiar sweep of plateaus and valleys she’d known her entire life roll by through the windscreen. She saw them differently now, for the first time imagining what someone from Outside would see in in her planet. Somewhere quiet and beautiful, and just a little dangerous.

In the back seat, Omi slept soundly in Mara’s arms as though under a spell. Luke started asking Shae questions about her family—and although Shae half suspected that he was doing it to reassure her the same way he’d done with the twins, it did help to distract her from the thoughts frantically roiling through her head.

“My family’s fifth generation,” she told them. “Originally from Ryloth, by way of Tangrene…”

\--

A small group was waiting outside the shop when they arrived back in town. General Paka stood with the two girls, who were practically quivering with anticipation. Sala stood nearby, her face tense with worry.

“You found him!” Mika shouted.

“Why is he asleep?” Kiki leaned over the edge of the speeder.

“He had a nasty fall and he needs to recover. Sleep’s the best way,” Mara said, smoothly stepping out of the speeder. She deposited Omi in his mother’s arms and spoke quietly with her for a few minutes.

Meanwhile, Luke gave General Paka an abbreviated version of the day’s events, one that left out any improbable feats of magic he and his wife had performed, Shae noticed, as the girls swarmed around them, peppering them with questions.

Shae stood by the speeder, looking down at the kyre hawk egg in her hands. There was something... _unsettling_ about the casual way that Luke and Mara had handled Omi’s rescue. They’d said they wanted to live somewhere quiet—but what did quiet mean to a pair of Jedi Warriors? What exactly were they hiding from?

She looked over at Luke, Mika swinging happily off of his arm; at Mara, chatting with Sala who rocked a still sleeping Omi in her arms, his head on her shoulder, legs danging down on either side of her hips. Just as normal and as ordinary as anyone else in town. She watched as Luke and Mara made their goodbyes and strolled back to speeder.

“No one’s ever going to believe what happened today,” she said quietly. It would just become another story passed around. Nadiya would love it; she’d hang on every word, but would she really believe the things that Shae had seen today? Nearly every aspect would sound as implausible as the wildest rumors that floated around town, rumors about Mara and Luke that Shae had previously dismissed as out-of-control speculation. After seeing what they could do, none of the stories she’d heard seemed as farfetched as she’d once believed.

“Maybe not,” Luke admitted. “But Mara and I aren’t going anywhere. I’m sure everyone else will catch on eventually.” He winked at her. “If you ever need someone to give you a hand on another rescue mission, you know where we live.”

“Come by the house some time,” Mara said. “I’ll teach you to shoot a _real_ rifle.”

“Our doors are always open,” Luke said, squeezing Shae’s shoulder.

“Come on, Farmboy,” Mara called, climbing in the front seat of the speeder. Luke took the controls again, throwing an arm around the back of Mara’s seat. He waved at the little group by the shop and started up the engine. Shae watched the speeder disappear into the distance until the cloud kicked up by the repulsorlifts had faded away as though it had never been there.

Wizards.

Kriffing _wizards._

**Author's Note:**

> title from "Sons and Daughters" by The Decemberists


End file.
